Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add great content on a consistent basis to automatically start driving web traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. We will explain what makes an expertly configured site different, and just what kind of work is required to ensure that when everything is set up and fully configured, traffic will automatically start flowing just by regularly publishing content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. Also, the business landscape is becoming ever more competitive on a global scale and businesses are looking for any and every advantage they believe will help them improve their performance and results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website allows their business to get off to a flying start as soon as their site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s one way to describe the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is extra labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this point with an anecdote.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Everything was going well in the widget-making factory when things ground to a sudden halt.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately went towards the main control box. After staring at the box for no more than 3 minutes or so, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny little hammer from his pocket and made a very gentle tap near the top-left side of the unit.
Immediately, the plant sprang back to life.
The plant manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager received a service bill for $5,000.
The manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged so much for so little time delivering such a minimal amount of work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to be compensated fairly for years spent developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your site configured so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
While many experts often make complicated solutions look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to get desired results
- Which options you need to configure in order to ensure that things function how you would like, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite complicated. It’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking on a button or two, or configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of many parts such as your server, your website, and a number of third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings in your hosting account that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your website can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites and online services.
External Web Properties And Services – Configuration
The purpose of adding external sites is that all of your content gets posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external platforms to your setup, content linking back to your site will get automatically added to these platforms. Your content and website will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some third-party sites and solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important information, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, use this information to automate traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, visitor tracking information can be integrated with WordPress via a plugin and automatically fed to other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account is with Bing have been set up, use this information to automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have profiles set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your social feed.
There are various platforms that can be incorporated into your traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot ignore the importance of securing your site.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and bots.
More info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(WordPress SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Sections For Improved Traffic Results
Last but not least in the web traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or plan to), it’s important that your website complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on why it’s important to have a compliant website here:
Post Tags And Post Categories
WordPress post categories & tags help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although search engines like Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Another Source Of Traffic!
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong web address or click on an invalid link, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do is add content consistently to begin attracting new web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and knowledge required to perform the configuration process can take some web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online with a WordPress website and proven online marketing methods.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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